Five years ago: Seymour Cray dies aged 71

Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray-1 supercomputer, died on 5 October 1996 aged 71.

Cray, who is widely recognised as the man largely responsible for modern supercomputing, died after a car crash several weeks ago. He was famous for saying there would always be a need for a machine "a hundred times more powerful than anything available today," and for setting up new companies to prove this when the company he was with rejected the idea.